DragonNinjaDotCom

Author: Yousif
Date: 22nd February 2004
Link: Heathenangel.co.uk

Resident HeathenAngel writer, Yousif, caught up with Jamie Oliver of Welsh rockers Lostprophets just before the bands final UK tour date in London. Here is what the pair had to talk about:

Yousif: How are you doing today Mr. Oliver?
Jamie: Not too bad, it’s been pretty good. The UK has been really awesome, in fact all the shows have been sold out, which is a surprise to us! But we’ve enjoyed them. This being the last show y’know, everybody’s got illnesses and stuff but we’ll struggle through! Like the troopers that we are!

Yousif: Congratulations on your recent Top ten hit with Last Train Home!
Jamie: Thank you!

Yousif: Last day of the UK tour – to say you must be fuckin’ knackered is a bit of an understatement!
Jamie: Erm … we went home yesterday for a day, so that was enough for us to recoup slightly but y’know we’ve been pretty much on the go for a couple of months now. In fact we’ve circum-navigated the globe in the last month, which has been interesting to say the least! But we’ve got another year or so, and we did this for three years before, so I guess we can do this for another three years! We’re fighting fit and ready so it’s not too bad. It’s just the flu bugs that get you down!
Yousif: So it’s you against the world then!
Jamie: Hopefully I’d rather the world were on our side! I’d rather see it like a team effort!
Yousif: Has it been worth it?
Jamie: Oh totally yeah! I mean getting this album done, taking it to the standard the way we wanted it to be at, we’re very happy with the record and being able to play the new tracks to all the familiar old faces and a bunch of new faces as well, it just makes everything worth it. All the late nights and nursing yourself to sleep at night, getting over flu’s and stuff like that, it’s very much worth it.

Yousif: Care to tell any stories?
Jamie: Well I mean, we tell stories, we usually make up our own rumours which are pretty funny to see how much people take to them. Mike Lewis was sick in a big meeting before which was quite funny with all the people at Sony in Australia like all the head people there in a posh restaurant and as soon as he told Mike a joke he laughed so hard, he was sick at the table! But y’know we’ve been up to crazy antics like that for years but he’s pretty embarrassed about that! I just love the fact that its not me!(laughs) I’ve haven’t made a fool of myself at last! So it’s been good.

Yousif: In terms of your music on Start Something, do you feel that it shows a ‘real sound of progress’? (pardon the pun)
Jamie: I guess so yeah. For us it certainly does. I mean from the first record not to take anything away from it and its not that we’re embarrassed from it, we’re not. We were just very much aware of what the first record was and it was all written on a low budget. Everybody seemed to think that it was our “Hey look out! Lostprophets record” and we couldn’t feel that it couldn’t stand up to three years worth of scrutiny. Whereas this new record I think, could and we’re very proud of it. We’re approaching it the same way as the last record.
We just went into the studio and just jammed and it was a very organic experience y’know what I mean, where we just play out the songs and crap comes out and occasionally we hit on a gem, and then we write the song around that. Like I say, we’re very proud of the record, so for us it’s a progression. I guess that you’re bound to mature, both musically and as individuals over the space of four years. I think that’s maybe come through in the sounds we’re produced this time around.

Yousif: Where does popularity lie in your list of priorities?
Jamie: In what sense?
Yousif: Well do you want your music to be heard by as many people as possible without the fear of being labelled as sell-outs?
Jamie: Oh, we don’t care too much about that. We know where our integrity is, we know who we are, we know what we wanna be, we don’t get bothered by people who have half-arsed assumptions about us over who we are and what we’re about. A lot of people don’t have the full information but we have, so we’re confident over who we are and what we’re about. We’ve always wanted to get out our music to as many people as we can.
I mean it’s an art and a form of expression and we want it to express it to as many people as possible. I sometimes think that any band who tells you they don’t want to do that is lying or being elitest to a certain extent. So y’know in that sense, we wanna get our music to many people yeah definitely. Selling out? What does that mean? The people that are calling us sell-outs, but we’re doing what we love doing and we’re doing it in a way that we love doing it. Maybe they sit at home on their computer and they go to work at McDonalds in the night for a multinational company and giving their time entirely to somebody else. To me that’s selling-out.
Yousif: It’s a mad world.
Jamie: It’s pretty crazy y’know … people take offence, some people are jealous and bitter because we show how much we appreciate what we’re doing you know what I mean? By being happy and sometimes misconceived as cheeky, but we really do love doing this. This is a lifestyle we’ve always dreamt about y’know what I mean? You don’t find us whinging about (whinging) ‘Oh we’ve been out too long, we’ve been on the road too long’ an’ all that nah, we love it! Bring it on!

Yousif: As a collective bunch, you all go a long way back. Do you feel that there’s a sort of love-hate relationship amongst yourselves and does that help in any way musically?
Yousif: I don’t know so much about ‘love’ (laughs) I don’t know so much about ‘hate’ ! I mean we’ve all grown up together, we’ve all sort of had the same sort of dream y’know and we worked very hard not on yourself. Sometimes you can get down on it and think y’know … ‘God is this the way I wanna be?’ but then you think ‘well I’m doing this as well for the people in the band that I love’ and I’m gonna pull my 120% in for them also because this is something that’s very important to them. So we egg each other on and we keep everybody else’s focus, we thrive off each other. There’s not a lot of hate that goes on in our band and it’s a very healthy relationship.
Obviously when you get tired or when people knock heads about certain issues but you know, we get over it because like I say we were friends way before we were in a band and a lot of other bands that are maybe thrown together as musicians, personalities can sort of collide but I really do think with us, we’re privilged to be actually travelling the world we all individually love, but doing it with five of your best friends ever. So like I say there’s no complaining from this end.

Yousif: How did you manage to collaborate with Eric Valentine on the new album in LA? Was it a polite coincidence that he wanted to produce your record in the first place? Or were you after a particularly different sound from the previous offering?
Jamie: It was actually very early in the writing process and we’d locked ourselves in the studio. We were thinking about certain producers, but we weren’t too sure who was available and who’d be able to do our record. So were fortunate to knock out a number of demos in the first couple of weeks locked down, and got them over to the management. So before we really thought about ‘we’ve got the songs, we’ve got the record, we’ve got all that’, we’d actually got our demos out to a number of different producers. And Eric was one of them that came back very quick saying that he was very excited on what he was hearing, he said it sounded really, really fresh, it didn’t sound as American as a lot of the stuff that he was being sent. So we were like ‘Oh, that’s kinda cool!’
So obviously we went on and did our homework and as soon as we heard like the Queens record, we were like ‘wow that’s a huge sound!’ It’s massive and powerful without sounding clinical. It’s the same thing with Good Charlotte, it’s still a big, big sounding record. And whether you like the band or not, you can’t fault the sound on the record, it’s just amazing. Of course, Eric has done a wide spectrum of different types of styles and bands, and he’s actually got in there and being able to catch the identity of each of those bands.
He’s done something as obscure as the Dwarves, but also as commercial as Smashmouth and Good Charlotte. So we thought he was suitable for us, and we just wanted to get a really good sound. So as soon as we found Eric was interested, we were like ‘definitely we’ll go and speak him and see what he thinks’ and it just sort of went from there. The guy’s a genius and he lives for music y’know he’s all humble and I can’t speak highly enough about this guy y’know what I mean? He’s incredible. He just works really well as a mirror for a band and he gets you ask questions for yourselves as a band and yourself, he’s just brilliant. So we were definitely happy with the outcome.

Yousif: Is it true that there’s a guest appearance by Good Charlotte in one of the album tracks?
Jamie: Yeah! They were in the studio and came to bring in their multi-platinum disc, million-selling, multi-like y’know, I dunno! They came round to the studio anyway and said hi. Eric introduced us to them and we were just like hanging out, they’re really cool kids and stuff. We were just happening to be working on one of our gang vocals, which is where the chorus is and needed heads! There was a bunch of us in there and were like ‘D’ya wanna join in? The more the merrier!’ and that’s how it happened. People get caught up on the ‘ooh publicity stunt-type thing’ …
Yousif: Yeah but any publicity is good publicity though?
Jamie: But it wasn’t something we were gonna use, we were trying to do it off our own merit. Because we feel confident in the record and in ourselves as a band, but it was nice of them to be willing to sort of, jump in and have a laugh with us. Much as we did with the Hoobastank thing. People seem to have difficulty believing you’re in a band to actually make friends that do things like that y’know what I mean? It’s not as contrived as it may sound. So yeah, they were there and they were cool and we went out fighting with them in a welsh way!
Yousif: Who won?
Jamie: Oh, we punched some kids, cos they were giving them lip! We were their bodyguards for the night!

Yousif: Finally, what can we expect from you in 2004? Will you be on these shores much or will the promising lure of overseas riches performance-wise prove impossible to resist?
Jamie: I don’t see overseas as necessarily being promising riches et cetera, et cetera, y’know what I mean? Our strongest and most dedicated market is in the UK. We’ve been here the longest and we’ve performed more here than anywhere. So we love coming back here y’know, going on response of this particular tour with it being sold and every show has been pretty amazing too. We can’t wait to come back. But again like I said, we wanna get our music out to as many people as we can so we’re gonna go to as many places as we can and perform. Because that’s what we consider our strength is, in our live performance.
So we’ll definitely be back in the summer, we’re definitely gonna do as many festivals as we possibly can and hopefully if things work out, then we’ll be back at the end of the year on a number of headline shows in the massive arenas, in the millennium stadium! But I dunno, fingers crossed! Who knows about this business y’know?
But it’d be nice to come back and do some more headline shows because it also gives us a chance to bring some bands that we like on tour, like the Bronx and Avenged Sevenfold this time who are supporting tonight, and I love both those bands, I liked them a long time ago and to have them supporting in the UK is a privilege to us y’know and we get to watch them every night so it’s nice to be able to show our fans, open them up to new music, which y’know we like and is good quality so in the future we can do it again some other time with other new bands hopefully.

Yousif: Thanks for your time Jamie!
Jamie: No problem mate!